FooPlot

I was just browsing Simple Spark and I came across a lot of neat software that I'd already used, some ok stuff, some interesting stuff and only (so far) one app that really stood out as uniquely awesome.

FooPlot is an exceedingly simple webapp that does it's job fantastically. It graphs. That's it.

It does what you'd expect from a TI-83 or such-like. It graphs functions, finds roots and intersections and not much else. IT also has some 3d stuff that makes you think 89. If you want to see all the functions it can handle look at the help tab.

The coolest thing is that you can tell it what to graph via URL. Check it out:

fooplot.com/3x+5
fooplot.com/e^x
fooplot.com/tanh(x)/((sin(x))^2)
fooplot.com/floor(2*sin(x))

Fabulous.

Using polarity in life

Steve Pavlina, one of my favorite bloggers, wrote a cool article about achieving peak motivation.

Now. I'll go ahead and warn y'all that Pavlina is pretty out there when he goes new-age on you. You'll notice this in his fear/love usage that just smacks of Donnie Darko.

That all being said, the man is quite insightful. In particular I like his two paths to the same destination viewpoint - I'll be adopting it with some major changes. Namely, I'll take off the rather large biases he puts forth and strip the new-age out of it.

Quick Summary
Here's the train of thought:

• There exists a point at which one has the maximum leverage to achieve goals
• In terms of one's self and one's relation to the external world, this point is the same regardless of one's goals
• This point can be reached in many ways
• It is easier to keep your eyes on a single goal than multiple balanced goals

• Thus, one should pick a particular goal

Polarity
So what the hell am I talking about?

//Skip this if you did not read the article I linked to
Pavlina's idea is that one should polarize and concentrate on either improving one's own life or improving the lives of others. In his view, people should work towards one of these goals relentlessly. Their overarching goal will help motivate them. In the end they will find that they end up at the same spot regardless of which path they took. The self-serving person will find that helping others gives them more interpersonal leverage and the world-serving person will find that they are in no position to help others if they themselves are in a weak spot. Apart from his new-agey views here I have some issues with the person who lives to serve others. That doesn't make sense. They are serving themselves - they just happen to enjoy serving others.

//OK. you can start reading again
My view is that there are two sources of motivation for people. These can be described as internal motivation and external motivation; however, it might be more accurate to say that one's actions can be measured against internal or external metrics. Let's call the person who uses external metrics an outworker and the person who uses internal metrics an inworker to signify what they are trying to fulfill.

The hypothesis here is largely the same as Pavlina's. Both inworkers and outworkers will find that they are maximally fulfilling their goals at the same point. Inworkers will find that they must compromise with the outside world in order to further themselves and outworkers will find that they need to maintain enough personal vigor to actively implement their external agendas.

Polarity applied to myself
So where do I stand?

Ok. I suck at this. I love improving myself. I generally have huge inworker tendencies. But then here's the kicker. The things that I love most are all outworker things.

Helping out a friend in need feels great to me - helping out a friend in want feels trashy. I'm not really sure why, but that's just how I do things. If you need a ride somewhere I'm not going anyways, do not ask me first. I'll turn you down merely because you asked me first. True story folks. But if you have to leave in 5 minutes and it's 02:30 and you're about to call a taxi because your friend who was going to give you a ride is nowhere to be found... well then I'd love to help you out.

I love how messed up that is. I'm not sure how I reconcile the outworker core I have with my predominantly inworker nature. Of course, there's no real need to do that, but I do believe that it's easier to be motivated about a single goal than a couple of goals that are often at odds. It's especially important in maintaining that motivation for an extended period of time. So what is a silly man like me supposed to do?

Well. I'm a stubborn dude. So I think I'll conclude that picking a path is the rational thing to do because it makes the rest far easier. And then I'll ignore that and continue to strive for this mythical point of greatest leverage with out polarizing. :D

Note: I e-mailed quite a few people about thsi article so my inworker/outworker concept is really just Pavlina's ideas filtered through a bunch of smart people's thoughts and processed by yours truly. Thanks to those that chatted with me!

Virtual World

I read a great article from the NY Times about Dr. Bostrom's theory that we might be living in a virtual world.

The great part was that it used a completely logical argument for this. Here's a quick run-through. Within around 50 years we will have a computer with the processing power of all of humanity's brains combined. Within 100 years such machines will be totally commonplace. A simulation of a complete human world will be as easy to run as something like the Sims or WoW is now.
For a number of reasons, future people are likely to simulate humanity. First, scientists will want to know more about the development of their ancestors. Second, playing with people, place or events you're familiar with is fun - witness the success of the Civilization series. Third, even if this was developed by some non-human race, they'd have fun playing with us too -witness orcs and elves in Warcraft, the aliens in Starcraft or even the near-infinite variability in the much-anticipated Spore.

What's the point? Well, if there are 9 million people playing WoW right now, it seems like a safe assumption that a similar number will play these new, more intensive games. So. If there's one 'real' world that hosts a million virtual worlds and all we know is that we're in a world, it's hugely probable that we're a simulation of some sort. Also, if computers start to be awesome enough, they'll be able to simulate things like worlds were simulation techniques are developed. And then you get a million squared. And the argument to cubed and more can follow the same logic. Basically, we are almost certainly virtual unless there is something else correlated with having this powerful a computer. For example, if we believe we'll blow up Earth earlier than this amount of technology then there will never be virtual worlds (assuming any aliens that could exist also kill themselves off before attaining this level of technology). He brings up other possibilities, but they seem sillier.

Near the end of the article, Dr. Bostrom says his gut feeling is that there's a 20% chance that our world is virtual. Personally, I'm thinking it's far far higher. Not that this affects anything for me, but it's an interesting thought. Please do leave thoughts. I'd particularly like to hear a religious take on this article if anyone's up for it...

Reading a book real fast-like

I just practice-read Stephen King's The Gunslinger. Practice-reading is when you try to read faster than you can actually handle. You get pretty bad comprehension, but it helps increase your reading rate. It took me 57 minutes to get through its roughly 300 pages. The first time through I went a page a second (this is to just pick up character names, a rough chronology and a bit of the novel's structure) and the second time I was going at around 1500 WPM.

This is actually a full 50% faster than my original goal for this whole speed-reading thing. w00t!
Also: it's about 4 times the speed I read at going in. Hooray!

It's hard to keep going at breakneck pace - having my computer yell at me every minute and louder every 5th minute helped a lot. I'd end up picking up the pace every time the 5th beep came along as I kept on falling about a minute slow. I ended about 3 minutes slow so I guess it was a bit shy of 1500WPM. Sadly, I don't actually have many books that are short and easy enough for me to read in one sitting like this...

It looks like a trip to the library is in order.

:-D

PS - The gunslinger series is pretty awesome. Not my all-time favortie but certainly in the top 10 and maybe in the top 5.

Neat magic trick

I just learned a fantastic magic trick. It's really quite simple. It's one of those tricks that depends on manual dexterity and quick talking instead of complex design. Truly fantastic.

I'll put up a youtube video when I give up on it. You can either see it there or from me (if giving up turns out to be unnecessary).

No big deal

So. I haven't written for a while. Partly because I'm on chillaxing at home and basking in profound depths of unproductivity an partly because my computer had some issues. Or, rather, I gave it some issues.

I was running some neat software I'd found that did diagnostics on all sorts of things and for part of it I needed to go into safe mode. No big deal. There's two main (read: safe) ways to get into safe mode. One is to hit F8 during the boot sequence. But, at the time, I couldn't remember which function key I had to hit. So I used the other method. Go to run and type in msconfig. Then check the /SAFEBOOT option in the boot.ini tab. No big deal.

I'll not that when I did this a warning came up that told me I didn't have priveleges to do that change. But then it let me do it anyways. This should've made me stop and think, but hey...

So I reboot and... realize that safe mode can't use my network log-in. Damn. No big deal. I'd just reboot and hit F8 (I looked it up) and select normal boot. Oh yeah. The boot.ini file defines what a normal boot is and I'd set that to be safe mode. Damn. Oh well. No big deal. I figure I can just log in locally and change it back and I'll be good to go. Well I couldn't figure out how to log into my local machine. Eventually I called IT and it was easy enough - I just had to use that password that they'd given us during orientation... yeah... OK. Now that I had that I just had to change it back and that'd be that. No big deal.

Sadly, I didn't have the privileges to use msconfig. No big deal, I could go and do it by hand (I just had to edit a text file). But I didn't have the privileges to edit that file. No big deal. I'd just change the permissions. Except I didn't have the privileges to do that either. Big deal. Well this sucks.

Then I came up with a solution. I could just use my linux partition to get at the text file and fix it. No big deal. Except that Fedora core 4 can't mount ntfs. No big deal - I could get the right package with yum. Except that I couldn't access yum off-campus w/o an ssh account. No big deal - I just sent an e-mail to helpdesk... and found out that Olin didn't have a yum repository for fc4 anyymore. No big deal - I could just change which repos were enabled and used the fedora-extras one to get me some ntfs support. Except they didn't have 3g-ntfs for fc4. Sad. Thankfully, a kind soul at IT suggested a Knoppix LiveCD with built-in ntfs support. Now it was definitely no big deal. Right? I mounted my windows partition. I found the text file. I opened it up. I changed the offending portion. And I found out that Knoppix only has read support for ntfs. Damn.

Then I found Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). This aptly-named Linux distro booted from a LiveCD with built-in ntfs read and write support. Hooray!!

Now, Lappy feels much better and I'm back online and fully functional. And I even found a hot new program to blabber on about. You'll get that shortly I'm sure. ;-)

Home is so unproductive

Continuing my earlier line of thought, I've played far too much Xeno Tactic. But now I've got the 6th mission unlocked. I haven't actually been able to find anyone online who says they beat the 6th mission. It does not bode well.

Boris' Brain - This is stupid. This is a huge waste of time.
Boris - Yeah but it's only for until Olin starts... (yes "for until")
Boris' Brain - Ok. Ok. Whatever.
Boris: Proceeds to forgo sleep in order to get the most uhmmm... nothing(?) out of his time

I came up with a pseudo-compromise. I will now close the webpage and put my 'puter in standby. If the game is badly designed enough that I shouldn't be doing such things I'll declare it n00bish and ignore it for the rest of eternity.

A little post

I haven't posted in a long time. Well here's this to put an end to your brief respite from my evil online voice:

Uhmm... actually. Nevermind. I don't really feel like writing anything. I'm gonna go play Noidzor. It's a sweet breakout-ish game. You'll note the noid in its name. I'm glad they acknowledge the time-sucking awesomeness that once was.

Then I'll go hang out with friends. I'm home now, so it's summer's summer. No work and lots of time. The clear path is to use it as ineffectively as humanly possible.

More on metric

I'm writing this as a response to a great comment on my post about metric system use in the US.

Do you really think so? Speedometers have both metric and imperial units, but I don't think that's done much to improve "metric literacy" in the 'States.

Listing metric measurements after the imperial units doesn't quite say "these units are the ones we will be using." Even then, the things that list both don't really have "teeth." Switching speed limit signs to metric only would, I think, have a much larger effect since people could be punished for failing to process the information.

But, yes. Hooray for New Hampshire!

True enough anonymous. That being said, speedometers are easier to ignore. It's an analog measurement so you don't get the effect of repeated drilling of a=b. Also, the metric numbers are way smaller and on the inside loop. It's true that you could just look at the left side of the sign, but I think the minimum benefit would be a definition for a number of common mileages (1, 1/2 etc). I'd guess a fair number of people know that 100 k/h is close to 60 mph because those actually have lines on the speedometer and they're pretty close. Likewise I'd bet lots of people know 0°C is the same as 32°F because that's a temperature that people are exposed to (on both scales) on a regular basis. I'd bet 32 f/s being equal to 9.8 m/s is also not uncommon.

Here's a long-term plan I just came up with right nowish. Whenever an all-imperial sign needs to be replaced, put up a sign with imperial units followed by metric units in parentheses. When on of these imperial-metric signs needs to be replaced, put up a metric-imperial sign that has metric units followed by imperial units in parentheses. At some pint, once everyone is pretty hip on things, stop having imperial units on the signs at all. Hooray!

I don't think teeth are needed. I don't think this is a switch we can, should or will make quickly. My thought is pretty much that the next generation should be heavily exposed to metric - they should become SI literate even if we have failed to do so ourselves.

Is this just me? If I think about how many meters are in 32 feet, I take quite a while to get a correct answer. First I estimate by using yards and I get just under 11 meters. On my second pass, I use 1 m = 3.3 ft and get that it's just under 10 m. Win.
It's odd that my mind doesn't just think of the fact that it knows 9.8 m/s ~ 32 f/s and that it can just cancel the seconds and get to a much faster, more correct answer...